Kerstin Kühn: James Beard Awards

In her latest piece, Los Angeles-based food writer Kerstin Kuhn looks at this year’s James Beard Award winners.

Earlier this month, the biggest highlight of the culinary year in the USA took place with the annual James Beard Foundation Restaurant and Chef Awards. These awards are a really big deal for the industry here in the USA and after a relatively quiet year for Los Angeles last year, a number of the city’s top chefs were honoured this year.

Most notably Suzanne Goin – chef owner of iconic Los Angeles restaurants Lucques, A.O.C. and Tavern – received Outstanding Chef, an honour only four other female chefs have been awarded before her, including Alice Waters (1992), Lidia Bastianich (2002), Judy Rodgers (2004) and Nancy Silverton (2014).

Goin, who won Best Chef of the West in 2006 and had previously been nominated for Outstanding Chef a number of times, is a Los Angeles native. She spent time with the Roux Brothers at Le Mazarin in London before joining Chez Panisse in Berkeley and then working in France at Didier Oudill’s two-star Pain Adour et Fantastie and Alain Passard’s three-star L’Arpège in Paris.

After returning to Los Angeles and working with Nancy Silverton as executive chef at Campanile, she opened Lucques in West Hollywood in 1998. The restaurant was an instant success and Goin was named one of Food and Wine Magazine’s Best New Chefs in 1999. A second restaurant, A.O.C., a concept of inspired wines by the glass with a small plates menu, opened in 2002 and quickly emulated Lucques’ success. Since then Goin has launched a number of other popular restaurants, including The Hungry Cat, a collaboration with her husband, chef David Lentz, comprising an eclectic market-inspired seafood restaurant, which has since expanded to locations in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara; as well as Tavern in Brentwood, arguably her most ambitious project, which brings together a trio of concepts under one roof – a full service dining room, a marketplace and a bar with craft cocktails and artisanal wines. And inspired by the more casual larder section at Tavern, she also opened The Larder in 2011, which now has three outlets across Los Angeles.

Other Los Angeles chefs to win at the James Beard Awards, which were held in Chicago this year (they usually take place in New York), included Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Animal, Son of a Gun and Jon & Vinny's, who jointly won Best Chef of the West. The duo, who also run Trois Mec, Petit Trois and Trois Familia with French chef Ludo Lefebvre, beat heavy hitters from San Francisco Dominique Crenn (who has just been named best female chef in the world) and Corey Lee of the three-Michelin-starred Benu to win this award. This is a significant coup not just for Shook and Dotolo but also Los Angeles, proving that the city’s dining culture of more accessible restaurants is gaining momentum over the traditional, high-end fine dining restaurants of the Bay Area.

Meanwhile Dahlia Narvaez, the long-standing pastry chef at Mozza, won Outstanding Pastry Chef having been nominated for the award for the past few years. Also a Los Angeles native, Narvaez first joined her mentor Silverton’s Campanile in 1999 and was name executive pastry chef four years later. Since her appointment of executive pastry chef at Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza, she